NEWS ANALYSIS : Strife Leads Soviets to Ask: Has Perestroika Failed?

Has the point been reached, after the week of tragedy in the Soviet Union’s southern republic of Azerbaijan, where President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms must be reevaluated as a strategy for the country?

That hard question, so momentous for the country and for the world, is being asked within informed political circles here after the double tragedy in the capital of Baku--the anti-Armenian pogrom, in which 72 people died, and the subsequent battle in which 83 were killed as the Soviet army sought to restore order.

“Whether you say that perestroika unleashed the forces that led to Baku, as the conservatives are already insisting, or that it failed to cope with the situation, as we progressives must acknowledge, you are left with a need to reassess it,” an avowed Gorbachev supporter who is a member of the Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee said Monday.

“ ‘What went wrong?’ people are asking--and they are right to ask. This is the very type of crisis that we said would arise if we did not change. But perestroika has brought changes. Quite evidently, they have come not fast enough or broadly enough. Still, how do we tell the people that we need to change even more when many will blame the changes for what has happened in Baku?”

Although some demonstrators in Moscow, as well as in Baku and the Armenian capital of Yerevan, began calling Monday for Gorbachev’s resignation, this is not a crisis that appears likely to lead to a serious challenge to his position as the Communist Party’s general secretary.

But he could emerge significantly weakened from what will probably be bruising debates within the Central Committee when it meets next week to discuss ethnic relations and the following week to debate the party’s program--a series of measures that Gorbachev hopes will broaden and accelerate his political and economic reforms.

“After Baku, the quality of his leadership is open to question, as are his policies,” one respected Soviet political analyst said. “In the 1970s, Baku would never have happened--things would not have been allowed to go that far, even if it meant very oppressive measures. In the 1980s, there might have been a small incident, but no big deal. Here, at the start of 1990s, they are still counting the bodies down there. Of course, that all reflects on Gorbachev and his policies.”

Just asking these questions, however inevitable they are, also raises what one Western ambassador Monday called “the ultimate question”: “How secure is Gorbachev, how long will he last, how much support does he have for his policies?”

“No one should suggest that Mikhail Gorbachev is nearing the end,” the ambassador said. “Not only is there no evidence on which to argue that, but there is no alternative to him, no successor, no rival, no opposition figure.

“But I think we will see that Baku has diminished Gorbachev. He is clearly not the omnipotent, omniscient leader he seemed in the past. He will no longer be Saint Mikhail in the West. And he will have to fight harder for everything he wants.”

A full assessment of the political impact of the events in Baku requires disclosure of far more facts than those now available, with all of Azerbaijan still closed to foreign correspondents and the Soviet press appearing to censor its reports from there. But such critical comments are multiplying already.

Yeltsin Speaks Out

Boris N. Yeltsin, the radical populist who remains a supporter of perestroika but a critic of Gorbachev, said during a visit to Tokyo that the Kremlin had blundered badly in using troops to suppress the Azerbaijani nationalists.

World chess champion Gary Kasparov, who is half-Armenian and half-Jewish and who fled Baku last week in a chartered plane with 60 relatives and friends, said the military action had come too late and could not solve Azerbaijan’s underlying political, economic and social problems.

And even Geydar Aliyev, the republic’s discredited former Communist Party leader, won a hearing when he told a news conference here that “those who took this decision made a serious political error.”

Gorbachev himself has long maintained the “inadmissibility” of military solutions to political problems, and in a weekend television address to the nation, he said that only the imminent threat of a takeover of Azerbaijan by a militant nationalist group with the real prospect of secession and civil war had convinced him that there was no alternative to force.

“It could go on no longer,” Gorbachev said. “The state is duty-bound to end the lawlessness and inhumanity, to curb resolutely the criminal acts of extremists who have lost all humanity and who are prepared to take other people’s lives for the sake of personal ambition, selfish interests and power.”

But this was an acknowledgement that the “new political thinking” that Gorbachev has pursued with such boldness and effect in foreign affairs had failed at home at a crucial juncture.

“You can say, quite rightly, that the Azerbaijanis and the Armenians are not the sophisticates that the Americans or NATO are,” a senior Soviet editor said Monday. “But Gorbachev has stressed that the principles of ‘new political thinking’ are universal. . . .

“What is more, as a matter of political style, his search for compromise seems very soft, and our people historically have preferred firm leaders. If perestroika is found to be ineffective as well as soft at this very critical juncture, their preference for the firm leader is reinforced, and that’s terrible for the development of democracy.”

Not Tough Enough

Even such a liberal as writer and historian Ales Adamovich, a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, warned in a weekend article that Gorbachev risks losing popular respect because of his reluctance to take tougher stands and, in the case of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, to use force there earlier.

“Can you achieve anything in this country with his character, mentality and psychology--without a strong hand?” Adamovich wrote in the avant-garde newspaper Moscow News. “He risks being misunderstood or just losing people’s respect altogether. Remember, the people had respect for Stalin!

“Isn’t there a risk that his personal democratism and nonviolence could be regarded as his weakness in a country accustomed to a different style of leadership?” Adamovich speculated.

Gorbachev, who has generally been a hands-on crisis manager, had let events in Armenia and Azerbaijan build over the last two years, alternately trying to persuade the republics to negotiate a compromise and scolding them when they did not.

In delaying the dispatching of additional security forces to Azerbaijan and Armenia, Gorbachev in effect permitted the organization, arming and deployment of militias there. He had hesitated with reason, remembering the deaths of about 20 demonstrators in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi last April, when soldiers were ordered to clear the square in front of government offices there.

The use of the Soviet army to crush what Gorbachev implied was fundamentally a nationalist insurrection in Baku came so late that, quite paradoxically, he appears to be getting no credit from conservatives, who have shown no signs yet of rallying to support the action. In fact, he was forced to rescind an order calling up reservists after mothers began to mount protests against their sons’ mobilization for Armenia and Azerbaijan.

With two important meetings of the party’s Central Committee ahead, Gorbachev was already under conservative pressure as he attempted to find a solution to the challenge posed by the Lithuanian Communist Party’s decision to break with the national Soviet party and as he tried to build a consensus for yet bolder reforms.

Soviet analysts say that nationalism, which had grown into a major problem over the past two years, is now certain to be one of the decisive political issues here--and a potential barrier to the acceleration of perestroika that Gorbachev hoped to achieve at the party congress planned for October.

The use of troops to quell the disturbances in Baku holds one set of lessons for some of the Soviet Union’s other restive republics, such as Lithuania and its Baltic neighbors of Estonia and Latvia, but yet another for those who see danger in Gorbachev’s plans for further decentralization.

In Azerbaijan itself, the army’s intervention appears to have galvanized almost the whole republic in its support of the opposition nationalists and strengthened the call of Islamic fundamentalism there. Prospects for a political solution of the conflict with Armenia seem even more remote than a few weeks ago.